


In the Mountains When the Leaves Were Falling

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Emergency!
Genre: First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-16
Updated: 2013-11-16
Packaged: 2018-01-01 17:13:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1046415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There are rules.  Every minute flicker, every crease, the flutter of lashes, the flaring of nostrils.  Rules give order, rules give sense.  Rules offer a chance, a promise, a seduction of safety in the dark.  A proposition - if, then.  If, you follow the rules, then, nothing will go wrong, and if it does, it is not your fault, you followed the rules as you understood them."</p>
<p>Craig Brice, Jack Bellingham, two beers, and Jack's unattractive couch.  Craig has never done this before, but that's alright, Jack's got time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Mountains When the Leaves Were Falling

_There are rules for a reason._

Craig Brice had not expected much from Bellingham. He had not expected the softening of his features - the way his lips tightened, his expression moving from mischief to concern. Up close his eyes are large and dark and without guile.

There are rules. Every minute flicker, every crease, the flutter of lashes, the flaring of nostrils. Rules give order, rules give sense. Rules offer a chance, a promise, a seduction of safety in the dark. A proposition - if, then. If, you follow the rules, then, nothing will go wrong, and if it does, it is not your fault, you followed the rules as you understood them. And you understood them. 

Craig Brice wonders sometimes if men like Bellingham simply _do not see_ the chaos that mires them. Everyone. 

When he was a child, though it is hard, for some strange unreachable reason to remember himself, the child, though he has pictures - when he was a child once he struck another boy, in seething, panicked anger, all because (and he remembers this, so clearly) the boy had argued with him over the rules of a game.

Every game had rules. The rules existed for a reason. To impose order. You were safe or you were out. The boy who was out had thrown his glove; that was against the rules. As a child he had argued this meant he should not play. 

Another boy, the pitcher, who was calm as the sun on the horizon and had the same sort of eyes as Bellingham, had shook his head and said to him, "Craig, you got to learn to loosen up a little."

Craig Brice had struck that boy something fierce. Laid him bleeding in the dust on the baseball diamond.

That was against the rules and he got in trouble and his father looked down on him as if from a great height (and he was a child, so hard to picture himself, as if he wasn't there) and said if you're going to fight, boy, you better learn to do it right.

Bellingham had not expected Craig Brice's fist to intrude on his demeanor, his words, his bright growling laugh. Blood had beaded on his lip, shone like a star in the morning sun, and trickled down his chin. 

The rules were either you learned to take what you earned, or you hit so hard the first time they couldn't hit back.

Bellingham, by his father's rules, should have hit him back. It would have been what he earned.

Bellingham had not hit back. Bellingham had taken him by the shoulders, a fierce grip, and then a softer one, and said that he was sorry. That was not in the rules. That was not how you played the game. Craig Brice felt fury burning in him again and he didn't know why, there had to be a reason why, there was, if you cut down far enough, a reason for all the things fools and kings alike did in the world.

Craig Brice thought and he thought and he thought hard and fast as if he could out-think the next blow. He could not. He never could.

Sometimes things in life were just better and faster and stronger and bigger and older than you.

Things like viruses, like bacteria, like infections, like heartbeats. You did what you learned and you did it right and you might outpace the blood and the fever. Medicine was getting better at it. Medicine was getting smarter at it. He liked being a paramedic. It was like being part of a puzzle. The picture was clearer and clearer. You followed the pattern. 

Bellingham followed no pattern he knew and it turned him inside out.

When he was a child he had read books about the natural world, every book he could get his hands on, and the rule in the wild was there were predators and prey, and the weak starved and the sick were left, and the rule of the game was _don't be the rabbit_ , and one time out in the woods at the foot of the White Mountains where their fathers hunted game that poorer men butchered, Billy Cunningham kissed him on the mouth and said he loved him. It was autumn, brisk and bright, and Billy's skin was pale and his cheeks were pink and his lips were red. 

_My brudder said when you like girls you give 'em a kiss like that. I figures, why not boys? I like you Craig I really do._

Their fathers hunted deer and moose and black bear. Venison in greasy stew. The stench of blood and wet fur from the shack behind the lodge.

His father caught them in the woods holding hands. 

_Don't be the rabbit._

But he ran anyway. 

Bellingham did not follow the rules. And Craig Brice did not run. He should have. He knows he should have. Bellingham likes me, he thinks, the way Billy Cunningham did, in the woods, in the mountains, where the leaves were falling and we should have heard my father.

(He never saw Billy again. There was something about a good school, a place for a boy to grow up, _a place where boys like Billy learn to be decent men._ )

Craig Brice doesn't know the rules Bellingham is following and it makes him sick to his stomach, but he follows anyway, like the yearling on a rope that one of the poorer men had hauled (legs trembling, eyes bright) into a clearing when his father handed him the rifle and said well, what are you waiting for?

Two beers (he counts them, he will drink no more, that's his limit, it's a strict limit) later at Bellingham's apartment his father's words come back to him.

"Well. What are we waiting for?"

Legs trembling eyes bright the rules of the game are as follows: 

_Don't be the rabbit. Pull the trigger._

"Thought you'd never ask," Bellingham - Jack - Jack, he insists, and this is part of the game, Jack - kisses him over the mouth, and it's slow and it's sweet and Craig doesn't know what he's feeling, his body goes haywire and he doesn't understand. He read the books. All animals. Sex drive. Mating drive. Stags tangling their antlers and starving in their own foolish desperation. All animals. Men are above the beasts, aren't they? Jack kisses him on the mouth, touches his arms, lays hands over his hips, the small of his back.

(the deer stared at him, not blank like the heads on the wall of the lodge that frightened him in the night, but alive, like some alien intelligence lived behind those eyes, like the sun playing on the raw, ragged velvet of its antlers.)

Craig freezes. 

(on scene. probie. line charged. hand on the back of his crewmate. _Middleton_ , says the back of the man's coat. dark. the red. the hissing of smoke. inrush. cold air. he freezes.)

"Craig?"

(get fucking moving. get going. what're you doing. move it. jesus christ. hold the damn line. _hold the goddamn line._ )

Get going hold the line pull the trigger watch the red go black watch the eyes go dark stand over it. Look it in the face.

"What're you waiting for?" He asks again - beseeching, the panic crawling over him. 

(the only person he ever kissed was Billy Cunningham in the woods and he never saw Billy or his pink cheeks or tow head or bright eyes again.)

"Easy, pal. Easy, Craig." Bellingham's arms come around him then, and he is pulled hard against Jack's chest. 

"I'm fine," he says. At odds. "I'm fine just tell me. What do we do? What do we do now?"

Jack's eyes are narrow but not fierce. They are full of questions that Craig doesn't have the answer to. He scrambles and scrambles but they are simply not there. All he thinks of is Billy's hands and lips and the crunching leaves and the dead yearling and his father slapping him across the back of the head so his glasses fell right into the blood he was crying then. 

"Jack?" 

(Billy, what're you doing?)

"Look, Craig, I know you think I'm 'bout as smart as a sack of hammers, but I really do think we oughta talk about this some now."

Craig grasps again. "I won't have another drink." He doesn't need another drink. 

"Last thing you need's a drink," Bellingham says. "First thing you need's t - aw, hell."

"What." Something is wrong inside him. Something like a rabbit. Snared. He doesn't like the feeling. He catalogs the feeling. His body prickles and his face is hot and his eyes are wet. 

"C'mere Craig, alright. Humor me. C'mere."

Jack Bellingham's couch is the exact shade of green as his first car. It was not an attractive car. He did not buy it because it was an attractive car. There are magazines on the table in front of the couch. Magazines about cars. A local neighborhood newspaper. A catalog of firefighting apparatus, the latest one. 

He opens his mouth but nothing comes out. 

Jack lays a hand on his shoulder.

Nothing. 

"You wanna talk to me?"

Nothing. 

"I told you once before, I recall, that I am a patient man, Craig."

Once, Billy Cunningham's dog caught a rabbit. It twitched in the dog's jaws and made an indescribable sound. 

"I never kissed anyone before." This is a lie. He is a liar. He is a rabbit. He is a staked-out yearling buck. He is holding the snare. He is holding the rifle. 

"That's alright."

"A boy named William Joseph Cunningham kissed me once but I didn't kiss back. I held his hand. My father caught us. We were laughing, or we would have heard him."

"Uh-huh."

"I never saw Billy again." 

Craig feels very small. It is hard to remember being a child. It is easy sometimes to remember being small. 

"Oh." Jack's voice is soft but deep; _resonant_ is the word, and up close, the resonance is in his body, too, in his flesh and bones, in his softer places.

Craig Brice takes his glasses off and folds them, neatly, on top of the chaos of magazines. They gleam in the low light. He presses the heels of his palms to his eyes until he sees stars. 

"S'alright, partner. S'alright."

He puts his glasses back on.

No. No it is _not_ alright. His father had explained very clearly the rules of the game which was that you _did not cry._ The books he read told him that animals could smell blood. They could smell blood and they could circle and hunt. Wolves could track the wounded for miles. 

He asked his father once if there were wolves in the White Mountains. His father laughed. It was a hard laugh, like the granite boulders left by the glaciers in their retreat. _No, son, no, we got the better of the bastards, long time ago._

As a child, small, he had asked for reassurance in the wide dark, nothing but a cat's-whisker moon and the stars like chips of mica scattered on the mountainside. A long time ago, his father said, and his father seemed to him at the time as ancient as the stones and he thought, awake in the hunting lodge surrounding by the gaping snores of men and the feather breaths of boys, that his father had killed the wolves himself. He thought of the smell of blood from the shack behind the lodge. The lodge was beautiful, clean mahogany-stained logs and double-glazed windows and green trim and a green roof and dead animals with glass eyes on every wall. The shack was gray shingled and small and there was a path to it, and to get to it you had to walk under the leaves that fell like a cathedral overhead. 

But you could smell it. Hot and slick. The breath of animals. 

No, it is _not_ alright.

Jack Bellingham pats his back and then lays his arm across Craig's shoulders. Craig shuts his eyes and opens them. Jack Bellingham's arm is heavy. He is wearing a collared chambray shirt that is small around his biceps. His shoes are scuffed and his jeans are fraying at the hem but not enough to notice if you weren't looking, and Craig is looking down at Jack Bellingham's leg and his shoes and the undone lace and the scuffed toes. These are concrete things, these are things he holds in his mind and holds up to the light and scrutinizes for some meaning.

He went through three partners, not to include Roy DeSoto, who is not included because it was intended to be temporary, before he and Jack Bellingham were assigned together. He knows that some men - he does not know who, and it bothers him - made bets that they would not last, that one or the other of them would snap, go crazy, bonkers, loony, whatever word they might have used. Money changed hands.

He does not know if Bellingham knows this, so he tells him. "Our shiftmates bet that I would ask for a transfer. Or you would."

"I know."

"I don't know what the odds were."

"Two weeks, outside."

"Oh." Craig does not know what to say to that. Some part of him is not surprised. Some part of him is dully angry, a flinty glare inside him, all he wants to do is his job, why is that so difficult? Why doesn't anyone understand, there are rules to abide by, there are tasks to accomplish? 

Jack Bellingham shifts beside him, and his body startles at the loss - the adjustment - of contact, but Bellingham is still close and something he can't parse or quantify craves toward the touch, toward the heat of him. Bellingham has his wallet out, pulls some bills and holds them out, in two fingers, towards Craig.

"I won the bet." Bellingham nudges him. "So, yannow, half this ought to be yours."

"I don't gamble."

"Wasn't you doing the gambling, was it?" But Bellingham puts the cash on the coffee table in front of them. Craig thinks that he is leaning close on purpose. He does not have to lean that close. He does not have to smell like tide detergent from a box, or a day's grime of sweat, or some dime-store cologne that pretends to be Brut or maybe really is Brut, he is not sure. The feeling curling inside him, stretching its claws, would want to be certain. 

Craig doesn't like the feeling. He doesn't like _feeling_ because he can't name it, categorize it, file it, know it. Feelings are complex and saturated. Naming all two-hundred-and-six bones in the human body is, by comparison, child's play. He could name all two-hundred-and-six before he entered high school. It made his teachers very proud. Proud was a feeling. Proud was something he did not understand. Knowing was what he _did._

And so help him if he did not. 

(Pain is also a feeling. Pain is a strange sensation. The human body remembers pain as an action; the human mind cannot define it.)

"I told 'em it'd be at least three weeks before you got rid of me." Bellingham is laughing. He hears the laugh. He can picture the structures of Jack's face moving. His grin. His eyes go low when he laughs. He smiles more often than Craig has a right to see.

"It's been - "

"I know."

"I'm sorry." 

"Why?" Jack Bellingham is leaning back on his unattractive couch. His eyes are as patient as stars, they are like falling leaves, they are like seasons changing. Craig feels the pull of his body, his mind. 

_Want._

When he was not a child and his body began changing, Craig rebelled against it as fiercely as he could. He read every book, even the ones he was not supposed to have. He crept deep into the stacks in the adult section of the library and read Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body and he read The Atlas of Health and the Human Form, and Physical Well-being and Modern Medicine. His fingers, still young, still small then, traced the figures and the words, in Latin, some words he knew and some he did not. The figures in the books were flayed open like the carcasses of deer and rabbit and bear and moose in the shack behind the lodge where his father and his father's friends smoked pipes stuffed with sweet-smelling tobacco. One book had photographs of corpses whose graying, leathery flesh looked like the salmon jerky one of his father's friends had brought back from Vancouver. 

The books were evidence, they were incontrovertible, they were cold hard facts. He was not the one in control. Glands would release hormones which would change him, and he had no choice in the matter. The books told him that this happened so that he could marry and woman and give her children. It did not matter that he did not want this.

The books told him that boys who did not want this were sick. _Sick._ He understood that. Sickness could be treated. It could be excised. It could be controlled.

In the library, in the deep stacks beneath the one yellow bulb, and crouched between a tall metal wood-and-iron shelf and a panting, clanging radiator with abstract floral filigree on the cover, Craig had thought of Billy Cunningham in the red-gold woods with his blond head and his bright eyes and his pink cheeks and his kiss. He had never seen Billy Cunningham again. He wanted to. Among the books and diagrams and photographs he wanted, he _wanted_ , and he bit his lip and swallowed the feelings inside himself.

Craig had told Jack Bellingham that he had never kissed anyone; this was true. Billy had kissed him. It was not reciprocal. He wished it was. 

Jack is leaning back on his unattractive sofa and watching him, and Craig wants to kiss him, he feels the wanting so fiercely it is like everything he has ever refused to feel since that day in library comes up and kicks his brain aside. Like waking up in the still pale dawn alone with the dreams that betrayed his body and made him shiver.

"S'alright, Craig," Jack says. "S'alright. I doubt you're the first fella ever gone without a kiss, doesn't prove much but you're human like all the rest of us." Jack smiles again, that crooked smile with his eyebrows all lopsided. His chambray shirt has three buttons undone and he isn't wearing an undershirt. 

Before he was twelve he could recite all two-hundred-and-six bones of the human body. He could name all the organs. He knew how much blood a grown man had, and how much he'd have to lose before he died. He had heard a rabbit shriek and watched a yearling quivering on a rope. He had pulled the trigger. He felt something when he did this, akin to terror, and he was sick. He read the books, and he was sick.

"C'mon. C'mere."

"We shouldn't do this."

"Why not? I like you, I think you do like me or you would've put in for a transfer before now. I get you're nervous - "

"I'm - " what. Terrified. No. Aroused. No. Sick. Yes. "Sick."

Jack Bellingham frowns deeply at him, and touches his face, and smooths back his hair. No one has ever done this before, and Craig has to strangle down the noise of pleasure demanding to be let out. 

"All of the literature makes it plainly clear that men who are physically aroused by other men are sick."

Bellingham rolls his eyes and throws his head back and says, "God almighty, Craig, you of all people should know that _sometimes people get it wrong_."

It's hard to argue with that. It hangs up in his mouth. 

"Wouldn't be where we are if some smart people hadn't figured out the smart people before them were wrong. Wouldn't have penicillin or IV drips or any of that jazz, isn't that right? Wouldn't even have paramedics."

Craig opens his mouth and closes it. "But - " There isn't an argument. Bellingham is shockingly, distressingly right. Sitting on the ugly green couch beside him Bellingham is _right_ , and it terrifies him to the core, yes, fear, yes, all through him, the same fear he felt when his father caught him holding Billy Cunningham's hand in the woods and he ran like a rabbit knowing he was too small and too weak and he would be caught anyway. 

"I mean, it's alright, Craig, if you decide you don't want somethin'. I like you but it's no skin off my nose." 

"I want - " His voice feels very small like his voice is ten years old and his body is not. It should not be so small inside his head. There is no logical reason. " - I don't know." 

"That's fine, too." 

He looks away. Turns his whole body from temptation. From things he doesn't understand and can't grasp. "Jack." 

"Yeah." 

"I don't - think you know this, and maybe, you won't understand, but - I spent so long, making myself not want - that I just don't know - maybe I don't know how." He sighs. He looks at Bellingham out of the corner of his eye so that Bellingham's face is blurred. But it is hard, so hard, to work with someone for so many weeks, and months, and not know the shape of their sigh or the way their body cants just-so, even if you are choking on the last of your air or your faceplate is singed and dark, even if you are not looking at them at all. It's hard to work with a man and not get to know him. It's hard to get to know a man. It hurts like a new pair of boots. 

Jack Bellingham tugs on his arm, brings him close, touches his face. It hurts to look at him up close now. Look him in the eye after saying what he's said. 

"You know," Jack murmurs, his voice steady and resonant, "you really are a good lookin' fella. I'm not messin' around with you, either. I will grant you've gotta be the strangest of anybody I've been with, 'cause at least most of 'em know their way around their own working parts - " 

Craig's face heats up. It does not help that Jack is stroking his arm, with just the backs of his fingers. It feels so _good_ it _scares_ him, it makes him want to writhe, it's agonizing, it drives him insane. What would the rest of his hand feel like, on his shoulder or his chest or his back? Pressure, here and there? 

"Look, Craig, ain't anybody here but us chickens." 

"Nobody ever touched me like that." 

"I got that impression." 

Jack does not understand. "Like _this_." Jack is still stroking his arm. "Just - like this." People have hit him before. The body remembers pain, an action, and fear. His body is recoiling as if it does not understand this new sensation. 

Jack's palm is hot on his skin. "Like this. 

Craig nods. He bites his lip. He does not trust his voice. 

Jack is frowning. Jack is frowning deeply and Craig does not understand why. "Think I'd like to fix that," he whispers. "If you want me to." 

Craig leans in and screws his eyes up tight and kisses him the way he wanted to kiss Billy Cunningham before the leaves fell and before they laughed and before his father caught them both. 

"You want me to?" 

"Yes - yes - I - yeah - I - yes - " He stammers and he sputters but it's just him and Jack and his body is overriding his mind now, his low brain kicking in, tearing at him like teeth. "Please. Yes. Slow. Please. Just - slow." 

Jack pulls him close and they sort of cascade into the unattractive sofa. Jack is grinning. "Slow, I can do. Slow, that's fine. I got time Craig. I got time." 


End file.
